Welcome to GATE 2014

We have a busy, exciting year ahead!
The Core Years 3 and 4 groups will be looking at "Time." We'll be researching, reporting, experimenting, designing and creating.
The Core Year 5 group will start the year by looking at authentic life problems and trying to solve them creatively. Then, for the rest of terms 1 and 2, they will be taking part in an online science challenge that involves experimenting, observing and drawing conclusions.
The Core Year 6 group will research, discuss and suggest solutions to future global problems set by the Future Problem Solving Programme. This term's problem is Social Isolation. (For more information visit fpsnz.co.nz).
The senior philosophy groups will discuss the issue of a new flag for New Zealand.
The middle philosophy groups will begin the year by discussing friendship.
We look forward to sharing our ideas with you and reading your feedback.

Core Groups Years 3 and 4

This term we are learning about flotation. Today we predicted and then tested objects to find out if they sank or floated. Then we tried to make some modeling clay float..it was tricky but we were successful in the end!

Year 5 Writers' Group,

During term 3, we have been writing our own books.We learnt that authors usually write from their own experiences. We could all identify with the experience of starting school. We read a wide variety of picture books with the theme, "starting school" and made a list of common characteristics. These included simple characters (often animals), information about the school day, questions to involve the reader and colorful simple illustrations. The main aim of the books appeared to be to reassure young children that school was not a scary place!
We then wrote our own stories and published them. We shared them with our target audience, some children from room 5.

CORE YEAR 4 GATE Renewable energy inventions

Core Year 3 GATE renewable energy inventions

Year 3 Core GATE

We have been researching alternative energies and presented our information as infoboards. We shared these with a friend. We really appreciated their feedback.

Core Year 5 taking part in the first Science Challenge

Our first set of experiments involved foam and bubbles. Today we investigated different liquids and the different bubbles they produced.